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I expect this is going to be a long-running WIP thread. My intention is to convert this heap of vintage lead into war games armies to allow me to field forces for a variety of Tolkien situations, using only vintage Minifigs. For those who are younger than me, Minifigs produced this line of Tolkien-inspired figures starting in 1972, and, as far as we've ever been able to determine, it was the first range of specifically fantasy miniatures ever produced. They were the first that I bought as well, and I will freely admit that this is a nostalgia project. I posted a batch of finished elves this morning. Here's what I have left to do: two elf riders, an elf king to form a second command stand, 14 elf swordsmen, and 9 elf bowmen (three of whom have lost arrows and one who's been redone as a standard bearer for the command stand.) For the era of the Battle of the Five Armies, they have some dwarf allies. Here's a dozen, representing all three stock numbers that were produced. Each stock number was a strip of two. I have a batch of seven already finished and based. Minifigs did not issue any specific Lakemen, nor, for that matter, any specific Rohirrim on foot. For the Five Armies-era humans, I'll have to reach into the historical and use some figures from their NS (Norman/Saxon) range with round shields. I've got about three dozen available with which to work. They should also serve as dismounted Rohirrim when needed. Beorn and Gandalf are also available, and a token eagle... To continue with the good guys, there were two catalog numbers of actual mounted Rohirrim. I have two completed so far, and about 22 available, including a few Later Romans or similar Dark Ages figures which blend well. A few spare horses remain to be found. The Gondorians were represented by five different figures, a citadel guardsman, two rangers of Ithilien, a spearman, a swordsman, and a foot knight. I've got at least a dozen of each, plus a total of two dozen of ME53 and 54, Rangers of the North. The Dark Lord's forces can be lead by the imposing squadron of flying Nazgul, of which I have four: I have 18 wargs (plus a few already finished), but only two of the goblin riders: Large orcs came in three poses, with sword, axe or spear. I've got about 85 to be done: Smaller orcs came in four poses, a bowman, a swordsman without shield, a swordsman with shield, and a well equipped armored goblin with shield, spear and bow. Of that latter, I've only got a handful, all completed. Of the first three, I've got about seventy from a recent purchase: There is also one pose of little goblins. I finished a few of them last month. I've got more, but they are sitting in paint stripper at the moment. Sauron's human allies were represented by four poses of figures; there was a Haradrim spearman and a mounted lancer, of which I've got about 30 and 5 respectively: There was also a Southern spearman and a mounted swordsman. I only have a token 3 of the spearmen, so they won't be a unit on their own, but I do have nine of the mounted swordsmen, so they can be. Last, I have a hobbit militia of about a dozen, plus a couple of mounted hobbits. The foot hobbits came in strips of three, and one strip is much easier to find than the other... My basic plan is going to be to play these with Dragon Rampant, which generally uses units of six mounted or twelve foot figures, with provision for heroes and large monsters as exceptions. However, some of the teams will be big enough that I could use Chaos Wars (also in sixes and twelves), and I expect that an actual Battle of the Five Armies game my brother and I have been discussing will take every orc/goblin that we have painted. Edit: Ooops! Forgot the Dunlendings; there are enough of them to make a unit, and given Saruman's forces a bit of distinctiveness...

I started painting again on my vintage Minifigs Middle Earth/Mythical Earth/Tolkien project recently, and finished off a bunch last weekend. Since I got a unit done, I gave myself permission to relax and paint a couple of individuals from start to finish. In keeping with the vintage Minifigs theme, these guys are catalog numbers NS9 (leveled spear), NS12 (club), and NS25 (raised spear). I had to reinforce the raised spear, which I discovered had cracked, with some superglue; I probably should have gone the rest of the way and improvised some sort of pennant wrapped around the spear shaft, since it left some irregularity. While these fellows are theoretically historical, they could see service in Middle Earth as militia of Bree, Laketowners, dismounted Rohirrim, Sharkey’s thugs, Dunlendings, or the more rustic Gondorians without being too much of a stretch. I found an ad for the range, which had been newly released as of October 1976, so just over 45 years ago. Minifigs apparently thought they were crossover figures of interest in the fantasy market, at least enough to put an ad in The Dragon (before it lost the “The”). All of you kids can be glad that you have modern figures to work with. 😁 For those who were there with me BITD, I will note that it is a lot easier to paint these today with acrylic paint triads and brushes that will hold a point than it was to use Testors or Humbrol enamels when these were new.

I am getting back to work on building a game with the original Minifigs 1974 “Mythical Earth” (unlicensed Tolkien) figures, which were what I started my collection with...because there wasn’t anything else. These guys stand 16mm tall to the top of their hairy heads, and were sculpted before the green stuff technique was developed. So there wasn’t much of a face to work with. You young people are so lucky; we had to chew miniatures out of lead with our teeth. (Grumpy old man rant ....) These guys came three to a strip for about 25 cents, as I recall. These represent one strip plus a stray spearhobbit from who knows where.

The last of 72 painstaking acquired 1974 vintage Minifig goblins have finally been finished. This batch of a dozen went very quickly as the third batch of them I’ve done this month. I have ambitions to play some D&D as we played in in 1976, but with more and better miniatures, so I based this last crew individually for flexibility. I am tempted to do a grumpy old man routine about how you young people don’t appreciate how good you have things in sculpting and miniatures choice these days, but I won’t. I suspect that everyone does appreciate it. Nevertheless, like clanking away on my manual typewrite is fun, it’s been interesting to see what I could do with these guys, a process made much easier by the use of modern tools such as acrylic paint and a wet palette.

After yesterday's work on the Bones 4 scenics, I dug around and finished off the first of a set of resin buildings I got from an Apocalypse Miniatures Kickstarter a year or two back: I also finished basing up a seriously vintage (ca. 1974) Minifig Ent: And, finally touched up basing and finished off my Gencon speed paints: From left to right, a Word preliminary round figures, a Reaper preliminary round, a Wyrd final round, and a Reaper final round. (So, 45 minutes on the preliminaries and 60 minutes on the finals...I added names to the two preliminaries; retitled the Word final, and attached the Reaper final to a Frostgrave-themed snow and rock base.)

My significant other is in a songing competition this weekend, and I’m along for moral support. Knowing that I would have some quiet time, I brought my travel paint kit and some miniatures. On the left are five Broadsword rangers, and on the right three Minifigs true orcs. The orcs are part of my Mythical Earth warbands project, but the Broadsword figures are a one-off. I didn’t have any Broadsword back in the day. Apparently none of the hobby shops I visited stocked them. My first encounter with them was in larger eBay lots while fishing for other old figures. I ended up with four of these archers in a large lot early in my eBay history, and then went looking for the command/personality pack later. I painted the swordsman/captain and the ranger-bard last summer. Now that they are almost all done, I hope to get them out as a unit of scouts in a Dragon Rampant game soon.

So here's my final for this unexpected snow day. Three stands go to the Dux Bellorum project, which I hope to play with this weekend, and the two on the right are part of the vintage Minifigs Middle Earth war bands project. As the Soviets are supposed to have said, quantity has a quality of its own...

I did a batch of 18 of these little guys last year. Every time I think that I have acquired all the possible large lots of these things, more show up. Shortly after I finished those, I got fifteen more in an auction lot, and have finally finished them up this weekend. In the meantime, I found another cache of twenty of them...at this point, I think I have enough. Now, I have to say, by modern standards these are some sad little figures. There is little detail, and the faces are very vaguely sculpted. However, it does emphasize a point I make every once in a while. The expected use of these things was in mass, and viewed as part of a scene during a war-game, rather than as individual show pieces. Therefore, the fact that there isn't a lot of detail means that you can knock them up pretty quickly and get to your mass effect. At normal viewing distances, you get something more like this: The one blue tunic stands out, but you can't tell whether anyone's belt is slightly off, or even whether they are cross-eyed. I am always in awe of the serious painters around here. I don't have the patience to do much of that sort of work, so I have been gravitating back to this earlier style... On to some goblins today, I hope...

My goal in the Thanksgiving painting binge is to finish the last six 25mm home cast Saxons I need to deploy a war game army, to finish a dozen or so 1/72 plastic Vikings needed to deploy a different wargame army, and to start some momentum on a project to do a set of inter-related Middle Earth warbands for Dragon Rampant, to be done with vintage Minifigs from the early to mid-70s. For those who might not have heard this before, these figures were the first commercial fantasy figures produced, and therefore reach back to the dawn of time for the hobby of fantasy gaming. http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Mythical_Earth Here’s what my desk looks like this morning:

I'm traveling this week, so I have a few figures and a travel paint kit with me. The ca1974 Minifigs Mythical Earth Rider of Rohan and Gandalf were well along when I started last night, but the 1981 Broadsword ranger-bard was just in primer. I have a captain to go with him along, and a handful of archers at home, which will eventually form a little Dragon Rampant unit.

I finally finished the basing and got some varnish on some vintage figures. These two are the veterans of the crew; they are Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth, AKA Lord of the Rings) figures from about 1974. The ME34 Ithilien ranger is masked in the sculpt; some of the Minifigs faces were a bit rudimentary, but not that much! He's from an eBay lot, since my brother retains (and uses) the originals that we had. The ME56 heavy goblin is one of our original figures, from Rider's Hobby Shop in Ann Arbor, ca.1975. I had some fun with his shield. I've got seven of them, and want to paint all the shields differently, but the rest of the goblins will probably be jealous of this one. I finished these two Heritage figures on a recent business trip, with my travel paint kit. On the left is a movie Boromir (catalog number 1750), which is actually a Classic Miniatures modern casting. He's the last of the nine Fellowship characters to be finished, not being my favorite. (I never liked Bakshi's depiction of Boromir, representative of the last great civilization in Middle Earth, as a horn-helmeted barbarian...) The figure on the right is a vintage cleric (1101), part of a pack of four expansion characters for the Dungeon boardgames, as best I can tell. Here's a group shot of the Fellowship, now that they are all finished...short people to the front!

I'm digging into my Old School collection this weekend, with this batch of old Minifigs. I have the rather odd VFW19, armored woodlouse (aka sow bug), and a group of 18 elves from the Mythical Earth range. I believe the MEs were the first commercial fantasy range. They're certainly where my collection started back in 1974. 8 more to finish, still on sticks in the back, 6 down so far this weekend, and 4 from a previous session. After that, I have to decide how to base them, probably for use routinely with Dragon Rampant.

I've been working with some of the earliest fantasy miniatures produced, just for fun. From left to right, ME23, a "true orc archer", ME24 "true orc swordsman", and a later DA28 Dark Ages Frankish human. When I say later, the DA series is still probably before 1980, but the orcs are from ~1974.

I started working primarily on vintage miniatures last year, and ended up with a bad eBay habit. Add that to a couple of good flea market finds, and I am now well provided with old lead. The first fantasy figures I owned were Minifigs (Miniature Figurines, Ltd.) ME (Mythical Earth) range. 40 years later, these are none too common, so my efforts to assemble a few units to supplement the survivors of my original collection (a half dozen ents, three wargs, a pair of Black Riders, and a giant) have been slow. Back in the day, of course, our fantasy armies had considerable overlap with our historical armies, so I have little hesitation in painting these guys up and adding them to the force pool. These guys below are a cache of 13 DA28s, Carolingian medium infantry. I ended up with three swords and eight shields among the 13 figures, so one swordsman will get the "personality" treatment, and the rest of the figures will be divided into 2 6 figure stands. You can see from the Sir Forscale that these guys are on the small side by modern standards. The other group are some Byzantine archers, from the Minifig Imperial Roman range. I ended up with an even 12 from a flea market find last May, so they will all end up as two stands. If I had to have one as a personality, the current Minifig producers still list these molds (as well as the DA series). As an aside, I recently came across some packages of Minifigs licensed World of Greyhawk figures (ca. 1977?). I was interested to note that a lot of them are recycled from other ranges, including the DAs, just to show how widespread the practice of historical overlap was.

In contnuing to play around with painting some vintage lead, here are two early Tolkien-inspired figures. The little guy on the left is a Minifigs (Miniature Figurines, Ltd.) ME-50 goblin, from their Mythical Earth range (around 1973). I believe this was the first commercial line of fantasy figures, so you can see the sort of thing we had to work with, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. On the right is an early Tom Meier sculpt, from Ral Partha, an E551 Southron spearman from their Wizards, Warriors, and Warlocks range. He's got a 1976 base stamp, so you can see why those early Ral Parthas were so amazing when they first came out. I am also working on a handful of Minifig historicals of similar vintage, so I shall hope to post them for comparison later, along with Sir Forescale.

My significant other was in a chorus competition this weekend, so I didn't get a lot done. Several things are working through the queue for my OLD miniatures project, and I thought that I'd go ahead and post them pre-basing as works in progress. First up is a Ral Partha Patriarch, ES-06. The trim on the tunic is cast in, so I decided to echo it in the cloak. He ends up looking somewhat Roman in the overall purple and white scheme. He's going to need a base scultped with flagstones; my intention is to preserve/incorporate the integral base on figures with base detail. Next up, from my box of figures "to do" dating back to the '90s when I acquired it from a friend who was a Heritage fan rather than a Ral Partha fan back in the day, is a sorceress. She's one of four figures in catalog number 1206, Female Magic Users, and has the characteristic later Heritage style, a little cartoony, but with some nice animation. I decided to keep the color scheme simple. This homely fellow is an Archive 650 pixie, who was rescued from my junk box the other week, when I started on this. Without something to show the scale, it's not obvious that he's about 15mm tall, so the shading looks very exaggerated. He's going to need a scenic base with a rock to stand on. I don't want to cut off the original base, so that will be easy to sculpt over the exisiting one than a tree stump, which would be my first choice of a natural pedestal. Last is a group of three 1974 Minifig elves (ME5). They are also going to need some rocks and brush to fill out a 60mm square army base. The sculpts are typical of Minifigs; not a lot to work with...